Coy Bailey uses his iphone5 with bible apps to work on his next Sunday school lesson at Mayfair Church of Christ in Alabama. / Patricia Miklik Doyle

by Chuck Raasch, USA TODAY

by Chuck Raasch, USA TODAY

It was Saturday night, and Coy Bailey, a Sunday School teacher from Huntsville, Ala., had a dilemma. A friend was offering a free ticket to a concert by country singer Jason Isbell, but the lesson on Noah's Ark that Bailey and another friend were teaching the next morning wasn't finished.

Bring the work along, the friend with the ticket suggested. And so Bailey, a 28-year-old gas company employee, grabbed his iPhone.

To and from the concert and in spurts during it, Bailey remotely shared an evolving lesson plan with his co-instructor. He accessed Bible-related sites - including the interactive GloBible - to mine for facts and verses. The other teacher did the same.

"Through the music and crowd I continued to watch text magically appear on my phone or disappear," Bailey says. Though "slightly distracted" during the show, they "shared some more bullet points and questions, added more scriptures" until they were satisfied.

Welcome to your everyday world of "Big Data," the infinite sea of facts, products, books, maps, conversations, references, opinions, trends, videos, advertisements, surveys - all of the sense and nonsense that is literally at your fingertips, 24-7, every day from now on. Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, estimates that humans now create in two days the same amount of data that it took from the dawn of civilization until 2003 to create.

Micro-bursts of technological innovation over the past decade have created a supernova of new data and a virtually limitless capacity to create and store it, shaping everyday lives across the planet. What may be most fascinating, experts agree, is that this change has come so quietly and seamlessly.

Think cloud computing. Or niche health care. Or even sites like Facebook and Twitter that further shrink the nearly 7-billion-people planet. All arrived because of increasingly sophisticated, and inexpensive, computer-and-sensing technologies, along with scientific breakthroughs like the Human Genome Project.

On a typical day, you might experience the power of Big Data in everyday ways that you scarcely realize:

Shopping: Retailers can target you with online purchasing appeals this holiday season because of a deep, long-term compilation of your Internet spending and searching habits.

Living: Big Data is responsible for most anything your smartphone does. From finding the answer to a trivia question to locating a nearby eatery, your device uses technology unavailable a mere decade ago to access data that are proliferating, Big-Bang-like, in cyberspace.

Playing: For year-around baseball fans, data has changed the very way talent is evaluated and rosters are completed. The graphic explaining why a pitcher throws more ground-outs that fly-outs is the product of a data analysis of the speed, location, trajectory and movement of every single pitch he has thrown in the major leagues.

All in a day's work

As Bailey's multitasking life illustrates quite well, Big Data provides powerfully easy paths to information that can dramatically change the way we live. He says he is not obsessed with its use - and never plays with his iPhone while driving - but is nonetheless moved by his transformation.

He video-streams from job sites if he needs to show a colleague a problem. He checks product information online if he is installing new equipment. He maps the locations of job sites and gets up-to-the-minute news and weather alerts on his way. He is in frequent contact with the 400-person list-serve of young professionals at his church. Bailey has used an online app to translate with customers in Spanish and Thai.

"It is the engine of my organization, and it powers my life," Bailey says of data.

But he also wonders how much of him is being sensed, collected and used in ways he doesn't know or fully understand. Bailey's concern is one echoed by millions of others, each time Facebook updates its privacy settings, Google mines a bit more of your data or hackers breach a database that just so happened to house your Social Security number.

A few years ago, he resisted the online life and fretted about the safety of Internet banking. Now Bailey rarely goes into a bank. He is chagrined over his Facebook privacy settings after a reporter tells him a minute-long online search revealed he was a 5K runner, had bought a house in 2009 and a truck last year, and enjoyed cruises and country music.

"There is a vulnerability there," Bailey says. "You know that your information - your online life - is on a server out there someplace."

Ultimately, the lesson on Noah and the animals surviving the flood went well for Bailey's young professionals class at Mayfair Church of Christ.

But it's the present-day flood - through Big Data - that has helped make networks such as Twitter and Google powerful new business forces, pitted governments against data-transparency sites such as Wikileaks, and given people the power to access data that even heads of state didn't have at their fingertips until recently.

Juan Enriquez, author of As the Future Catches You: How Genomics and Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, writes that "today, a street stall in Mumbai can access more information, maps, statistics, academic papers, price trends, futures markets and data than a U.S. president could only a few decades ago."

He makes this observation in an essay in Smolan's The Human Face of Big Data, which Smolan - a former National Geographic photographer - co-edited with Jennifer Erwitt. Early this month, Smolan and Erwitt sent copies of their book to 10,000 leaders and personalities in government, business and entertainment, from President Obama to Jordan's Queen Noor to Justin Bieber.

"We need to have the smartest people on Earth aware of, and talking about this," Smolan says.

Jonathan Harris, owner of the storytelling site cowbird.com, says a "few hundred" software engineers, mostly male and between 22 and 35, are writing data software around the globe that is "transforming the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people."

"Previously," Harris writes in Smolan's book," "this kind of mass transformation of human behavior was the sole domain of war, famine, disease, and religion, but now it happens more quietly, through the software we use every day."

Smolan and Erwitt hypothesize that Big Data is creating technological immortality, where "each of us now leaves a trail of digital exhaust, an infinite stream of phone records, texts, browser histories and other information that will live on forever."

Building businesses

Those are abstract discussions for the people who are harnessing Big Data in new products and companies.

Adeyemi Adesokan, co-founder of the Cambridge, Mass., biotech firm Pathogenica, has traveled across Europe selling a data-analysis system that allows early detection of hospital-acquired infections (HAI), a growing, costly and deadly problem for hospitals worldwide. His system uses voluminous, real-time collection of medical tests and doctors' reports to detect bacteria responsible for 95% of all HAI infections.

Adesokan says his company also is collaborating with Harvard molecular geneticist George Church on a "Bioweather Map," a system to rapidly detect outbreaks of infectious diseases through widely dispersed and inexpensive reporting devices all over the world.

Adesokan says the 2003 completion of the Human Genome Project, married with exponential gains in sensing-and-computing technology, made companies like his possible in just the past few years. He predicts that an era of personalized medicine, in which drugs will be manufactured to individual needs, is not that far off.

But Adesokan says Big Data can overwhelm. Though the mapping of the human genome has greatly accelerated research over the past decade, he says, "we haven't really yet seen a shortening of drug development time lines, just a better realization of the complexity of the challenges."

Information creep

For David Hansen, 39, a father of four in a Salt Lake City suburb, the practical effects of Big Data are noticeable every time he gets on an airplane or talks with his 11-year-old son about being careful online.

Hansen is a project manager for Azteca Systems, a software company based in Sandy, Utah. He travels 40% of the time for this data-based job, but he first noticed Big Data's impact in his personal life.

Before owning an iPad and Kindle, Hansen, who calls himself "a fairly spiritual person," says he was always lugging books and scattering paper on planes or in motel rooms in a scattered effort to track his spiritual journey. Now he has created a "personal Wikipedia" account to keep his facts and thoughts.

Hansen wondered whether he should continue using a certain browser after an online airline ticket search produced a jarringly personal ticket solicitation.

"It is free, and we become the products, and they just give us free stuff to come back. I know all that," Hansen says of browsing online. But in the end, he rationalized staying with that browser by maximizing his privacy settings and realizing that the ease and access to information had become too much a part of his life. "I have to get comfortable with the fact that there is just a certain amount of data people will know about me," he says.

Perhaps his last stand: He's recently decided to try to stay offline on weekends. "Are we really getting away from things that ... are really important?" Hansen asks. "If I go home and I am reading my Twitter feed and I am being filled with trivia but I am ignoring my kids, ultimately what is the outcome of that?"